A great profile in the NYT about Andy Rubin, head of the gPhone initiative at Google.

Quoted: With battle lines being drawn for dominance in the smartphone market, Google is placing its mobile bets in the hands of Andy Rubin.

Speculation about the forthcoming Google phone. I'm excited to see what they do, especially with HTC as a partner. Google has the oomph to really change things in this industry. It might make sense to strike while all the iPhoners are pissed about the lack of hackability.

Quoted: Quiet Taiwanese company could become Google phone partner.

A somewhat simplistic study points to better click through rates on Yahoo than on Google.

Quoted: Yahoo Inc.'s search engine gets a higher percentage of users to click on the results of a query than market leader Google Inc.

Remember a couple years ago when Facebook was turning down offers for 1 billion and we were calling them crazy? Yeah, those were those good old days now. Microsoft is reportedly seeking a partial stake which would value the company somewhere around 10 billion. Yowzah!

Typical Microsoft: choose to differentiate in a non-material way. Microsoft has just upgraded their Windows Live Hotmail service to 5 GBs. Don't get me wrong, that's nice but it's not a meaningful difference from the 2.89GB being offered by GMail. I'm a pretty hefty email user and I am currently using 6% of my GMail capacity.

Recap of Steve Ballmer's dialog with Mossberg at the D5 conference today. Mentions a bit about surface computing.

Did you guys know that Blue Dot was acquired by Ask in 2008? Yes, it's a message from the future...

Quoted: Google bought Magnolia and Simpy in 2007 (both were immediately merged with Google Bookmarks), and Ask acquired Bluedot in 2008. Now all the big three had efficient bookmarking services that could deliver input to search algorithms.

This is a better and much more detailed article on the Google strategy to enter the enterprise market. I've excerpted one of the interesting bits below.

Right now, it looks like the largest "Achilles's heel" would be that the Google apps work only when a user is online. You need to export to Word, Excel, etc. to work on something locally. It's only a matter of time, however, before web constraint becomes a moot problem. Web penetration continues its advance and will acheive ominpresence for the vast majority of us within the next several years.

Couple the web presence argument with the fact that I can work locally on all of my docs using free Open Source apps like OpenOffice and we're already talking about free solutions available today which will do the work that more than 90% of us actually need it to.

The article points to Microsoft's weakness being in collaboration. I have to say I think that Microsoft has software that has tons of collabrative features that nobody knows how to use or which force bad choices (such as forcing a browser) on people. At work, we use Sharepoint for sharing a lot of docs. It works pretty well and thank heavens we have someone in the office (MIke), who knows the product really well and can show us all of the features that are in there as we need to use them.

As a Firefox user, Sharepoint's collaborative functions don't work (they require activex in ie). I had to download an extension for it to work there. On my mac, the extension is not available - so that just sucks.

I think Microsoft should spend some time crafting some new interfaces for the existing products. Put different faces on it for different markets and solve particular use cases really well. How hard would it be for them to cobble together a little Sharepoint, Outlook, and Project into one of the most kick-ass pieces of Program Management out there? You could get people buying more of the product they already own if you enable all of it online in some nice interfaces! Think 37signals and you have enough fun software to build for many millions of end-users.

Quoted: Google's plans include prompting people who send Microsoft Office documents using Gmail to translate those files into Google's formats for editing on Google.com, presumably in a forum where ad space is up for sale. Gmail messages that include attached files currently prompt users with links to download the documents or view them on the Web.